[ SECRET POST #3813 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3813 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Daredevil TV]


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03.
[Wonder Woman (2017)]


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04.
[Isabel Maru, Wonder Woman]


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05.
[Sense8]


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06.
[Schitt's Creekt]


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07.
[Re:Creators]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #546.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[sarillia]

I'm really curious about that interview now.

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[ketita]

here you go

Most of those names are nothing that you'd need a "pronunciation guide" for, and a lot of them do that thing where the pronunciation is obviously American English, which throws me out of fantasy novels way too often - since the American English vowels are sort of outliers, and chances are that unless your fantasy people are speaking specifically American English they should be pronouncing the names the way you'd pronounce, say, Spanish or Japanese.
rrrghhhhh I can go on for hours about this XD

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[sarillia]

Maybe you can help me with something since you care about this.

I always worry about having the names in the worlds I come up with seem too similar to a certain real-world language, because I'm afraid people will expect the culture to be like that of a place that speaks the language it resembles. Like, if I have "ch" have the same rules as in Italian, people might expect that the place is inspired by Italy.

Is that an assumption you would make?

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[ketita]

:) I do indeed care about this!

I think that this is where to some extent, you can't quite avoid association with an existing language, because of course people are going to make the connection and make assumptions based on that. I'm not sure that conlanging everything to the Nth degree is the way to go, either, because that can get kind of exhausting - both for you and for the reader.
However, I think there's a lot more to a culture than just the language. If you present a language which seems Italian-ish, but from the beginning show that this culture is very clearly Not Italy, that should cut down on some of the assumptions.

Either way, I think it's helpful to actually know a thing or two about languages when embarking on something like this, because honestly, I think this video of Rothfuss' is embarrassing.

In one thing that I'm working on I have multiple languages which are "based on" Earth languages, mostly because I didn't want to go conlanging forever. But there's a dramatic mismatch between the language and the culture/race, so that will hopefully help convey that this should not be read in light of our world. For example, there's a country called Novadbaria where they speak "Russian", but the visuals are sort of based off Turkey, and they're also matriarchal and have a very different history. Or you have Atret Mer where they speak "French", but the visuals draw from China, the Ukraine, and France, they have a Judaism-based religion where everybody has long hair, and a really dramatic civil war in their recent history.

I mean since my thing isn't published yet I don't know how people will respond to it, but that's what I think, at least.

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[sarillia]

I don't usually base a language directly on a real one. I tend to think about features of the language, deciding on what phonemes exist in the language and toying with things like vowel harmony or a marked distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, and then I play around with names that work with the features I've picked out.

But like you said, associations are inevitable (it's just what our brains do) and sometimes I look at the results and think people are almost certainly going to think of a particular language. I worry that people would expect other similarities in the culture and would find the rest of it to be sort of mismatched. Personally I wouldn't have that problem, and it sounds like you wouldn't either, but I've gotten some mixed messages. Which I guess is what I should always expect when I ask these kinds of questions.

Re: Obvious Author Favorites That You Ended Up Hating

[ketita]

At the end of day, there's not much you can do. Some people are always going to misread your work, or leap to assumptions, etc. To me, just using phonemes and such sounds perfectly legitimate. You can't control what expectations people might have; all you can do is try to demonstrate that it's not like that.
Some readers are just not discerning, what can you do.

In my case, I'm using the actual languages because I need them to be spoken... there are things like street signs, dialogue, graffiti, etc. which I would have to effectively make a Russian-based-conlang in order make work. Since my story has multiple cultures, I just honestly don't have enough time for that -_- it's enough that I've got a full Greek-based conlang!
So I'm kind of doing that thing where when the characters are speaking "English" the reader knows it's not literally English... so in this case, it's "translated" as French in our world, but not literally French or literally Russian.
Eh. I hope people get it.